Female drag racers enjoy weekend success

Doug Goodman

Wednesday

Apr 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMApr 30, 2008 at 12:44 PM

Ashley Force and the young girls at Byron Dragway provided examples last weekend of how female drivers are excelling in their sport. Force, 25, made national news Sunday when she became the first female to win an NHRA Funny Car race, beating her father, John, in the finals.

Ashley Force and the young girls at Byron Dragway provided examples last weekend of how female drivers are excelling in their sport.

Force, 25, made national news Sunday when she became the first female to win an NHRA Funny Car race, beating her father, John, in the finals.

Female drivers dominated Saturday at Byron Dragway, too.

Girls met in the finals of both races in the Junior Dragster class, where children ages 8 to 17 compete in scaled-down cars. Only twice before had female drivers met in the finals in the division’s 14-year history.

“I’m often asked why more women get involved in drag racing than other sports,” Force said during a teleconference Tuesday.

“It’s because NHRA offers so many other categories. You don’t have to jump in a 300-mph race car. You can run your street car at the track. There are all the sportsman categories, and that’s where a lot of families will bring out their children. They are the ones who get the racing bug and want to keep doing it.”

Force’s success is drawing notice from the local girls in the Junior Dragster program.

“I watch her on TV and sometimes I get online and check up on how she is doing,” said Gabby Baldridge, a 13-year-old Stillman Valley eighth-grader. “I like to see other women out there doing what I’m doing, drag racing.”

Baldridge has seen changes in the division in her five years racing a Junior Dragster.

“It’s a lot different now because there are more girls now than when I started,” she said. “It’s easier for the new girls now because they know they are not the only girls.”

Nearly half of the 23 competitors Saturday at Byron were girls.

“There would be probably five or six when I started,” said Baldridge, the 2005 Cedar Falls (Iowa) Junior Dragster champ.

And the young girls are doing well. In one of the races Saturday, five of the final six drivers were females.

Drag-racing icon “Big Daddy” Don Garlits isn’t surprised how well women are faring in the sport.

“What it tells me is how safe we’ve made it,” the 76-year-old said in a telephone interview from his home in Florida. “When it was dog-eat-dog and if you crashed you died, women didn’t want any part of it.

“Look at the (safety) get-up they put on them before they get into these cars. The helmet is almost as big as the whole woman.”

He said he could see a point when women will win all the NHRA categories.

“When I started out there were no women, period,” said Garlits, who will be at Byron Dragway on Sunday. “A lot of things have changed since 1949. It’s not like that anymore.”

Few women competed at area tracks when Monty Fisher of Rockford began racing motorcycles in 1973. Fisher, 57, went on to win four motorcycle track championships at Byron Dragway and two more at Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wis.

“When I first started with motorcycles, I had to prove myself to all the racers because there were very few women who raced at that time,” she said. “But once I did that, I was pretty much an equal. I was one of the guys.”

Fisher switched to a dragster in recent years and joined a handful of women racing in Byron’s elite Super Pro division. In 2006, she made track history as the first female to win a Super Pro event.

“I think we will see more girls (in Super Pro) but not equal to the numbers in Junior Dragster,” Fisher said.

She is excited about Ashley Force’s victory and is hopeful the win helps her to the Funny Car championship.

“If she wins the season championship, it would inspire more women to come out,” Fisher said.

Doug Goodman can be reached at (815) 987-1386 or dgoodman@rrstar.com.

‘Big Daddy’ Garlits at Byron on Sunday

Drag-racing legend “Big Daddy” Don Garlits will make his first appearance at Byron Dragway in 25 years Sunday as grand marshal of the fifth annual Spring Nationals.

Garlits, 76, will be available for autographs and photos, and he will display Swamp Rat 8, one of his classic dragsters.